2 NEW FILMS MINE KILLER AILEEN WUORNOS' STORY

After she was arrested at the Last Resort bar in Port Orange in January 1991, Aileen Wuornos, a stocky, straggly haired woman with desperate eyes and a foul mouth, didn't hesitate to tell judge and jury exactly what she thought of them when she appeared in court.

She had lived in rented rooms and on the streets among Florida's drifters and earned her living as a prostitute along the interstate highway. In late 1989 she killed one of the men who picked her up, and over the next year killed at least five more. (She was executed for those crimes in October 2002.)

Tabloids flocked to her case, and in the decade she spent on Florida's death row Wuornos was alternately called a man-hating lesbian killer, America's first female serial killer or a feminist hero who murdered in self-defense.

The fascination with her continues in two new films. Monster, a feature by first-time director Patty Jenkins that was filmed in Central Florida, opened Wednesday in New York, with Charlize Theron playing Wuornos. (No opening date has been set yet for Orlando.) Critic Roger Ebert calls her work "one of the best performances in the history of cinema," a performance for which she was nominated for a Golden Globe award.

In The New York Times, Stephen Holden wrote: "The emotional intensity of her unforgettable performance recalls Hilary Swank's Oscar-winning turn in Boys Don't Cry, a bleak slice of American life that leaves the same bitter aftertaste as Monster."

A documentary by Nick Broomfield and Joan Churchill, Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer, his second about her, will open in New York next week.

On a recent visit to New York from Los Angeles, Jenkins recalled that as a college student she watched Wuornos on television.

"It was this circus," said Jenkins, now 31. "Aileen was a prostitute, she had been raped several times, she had had a horrible childhood. She had obviously committed these acts, but there was something so tragic about her, something that made me not able to look away, something scary and at the same time heroic and heartbreaking. Heroic not for what she did but for surviving."

A SOCIAL OUTCAST

Wuornos grew up in Troy, Mich. Her mother abandoned her as an infant, and her father committed suicide while serving a prison sentence for child molestation. As an adolescent she lived for a time in the woods at the end of her street. She was pregnant at 13.

"It's this unbelievable story about a social outcast," Broomfield said in New York recently. (His first documentary was the 1992 Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer.) "She lived like a wild animal, an outsider in the woods, giving sexual favors to men. It's a devastating portrait of small-town America, which looks to the family to solve its problems."

Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer features not only interviews with Wuornos but also Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida in a news report saying that "her appeals have been exhausted, she wants to meet her creator." Broomfield takes the viewer on a tour of the Troy neighborhood with Wuornos' best friend, Dawn Botkins, and interviews her mother, who asks him the date of the execution and says she'll feel better when it's over.

Monster operates on a more intimate scale. Its time frame is primarily the year Wuornos was committing the murders, and the film centers on her relationship with Selby (Christina Ricci), whom Wuornos falls in love with and struggles to hold on to. Selby is needy and manipulative; she is based on Tyria Moore, Wuornos' real-life lover who, after she had been picked up on the concealed-weapons charges, spoke to her by phone in the presence of police and elicited from her a confession to the murders.

Jenkins began writing to Wuornos in early 2002. "I told her I wanted to tell the truth, that I wanted to find that space in between the man-hating lesbian serial killer and the feminist hero," said Jenkins, who had made several shorts while attending the American Film Institute's directors' program. At "a two-second power meeting" at the end of the program, Jenkins was told that a movie about the serial killer Ted Bundy was faring well at Blockbuster Video, with the implication that money for such subjects was available.

A DETACHED VIEW OF HORROR

Jenkins, who wrote the script for Monster, and Wuornos corresponded but never met.

"On the night before she was executed, she gave us her blessing to look at her letters," Jenkins said. Shortly after the execution, she and Theron flew to Troy to read those letters, written primarily to Dawn Botkins.

"What struck me was the way she talked about these horrific things in a detached fashion," Theron said in a recent interview. Theron, 28, who is tall, blond and striking, gained 20 to 30 pounds for the role and was heavily made up to look like Wuornos. "In describing something that happened, she'd write, 'I know I was 14 because that was the same year I gave the baby up for adoption.' It broke your heart. She was raped, she was a homeless kid. At 14 she's living in forts and has frostbite. But it's all brought up not in a melodramatic way. That was her reality."

When Theron, who grew up in South Africa, first read the script, she wasn't aware that it was based on a real person. "The character was written so well," she said. "On one page I'd feel sorry for her, on the next page I'd hate her."

Jenkins cast Theron, she said, because she "sensed tremendous heart and bravery" in the actor's previous work. "She understands the darkness, that darkness can come at any second of your life," Jenkins added. When Theron was a teenager, her mother shot and killed her father in self-defense, something Theron talks about matter-of-factly.

"By now, that's old news," she said. "As an actor, I was taught to substitute my emotional journey with the character's." She added, referring to her father's death, "I showed my mother the script, and it didn't even come up."

"Aileen was someone who never loved until she met this woman, Selby in the film," Theron said. "This searching, the betrayal, the need to love, is something we can all relate to, but in Aileen's case it was more desperate. Her life was like watching water go down a drain, spiraling out of control."

She added, "I want to make it clear, none of this justifies anything she did."

"But somehow, Aileen always had hope that this good life could come her way," she continued. "She aspired to something bigger, and there's a lot of people who don't believe in anything."

When Broomfield looks back on Wuornos, whom he believed was "psychotic," he remembers her eyes. "They were hypnotic and sad and terrifying, in equal measure," he said. "She had this unbelievable laugh -- it was big. She'd make a joke and scream with laughter.

"She was witty in a streetwise kind of way. When she wasn't going off and off about the police, she was very insightful to talk to. There was a basis of truth in everything she said, but her paranoia took it too far."